Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa currently has a collection of over 60,000 books and supports the work of Te Papa kaimahi with its wide-ranging books and resources about Aotearoa New Zealand history, Pacific cultures, mātauranga Māori, art, natural history, and museum studies. The library was first mentioned in the annual reports in 1867, and over the next 150 years, it has grown and changed along with the museum. But how are those extensive records managed – especially the older ones? Cataloguing and Acquisitions Librarian Kim McClintock reveals how some of this mahi happens.
As the library collections developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the main aids used to understand what books were held in collections – and how to find them – were themselves printed books and card catalogues. Print catalogues listed a library’s holdings so they could be distributed to other institutions. They took time to print and quickly became out-of-date, requiring new editions or supplements as a library rapidly built its collections [1].
By the late 1800s, most libraries used card catalogues as finding aids. These were individual cards containing basic bibliographic information about a book, including title, author, and classification number, like a Dewey Decimal Classification number. At the museum, the card catalogue was stored in the library space so staff and library visitors could search for books held in the collection. In the mid-to-late 20th century, these card catalogues started to be replaced in most institutions with an online public access catalogue or OPAC [2].
Here at Te Papa, we moved to an electronic catalogue in the 1990s, allowing us to share our holdings information more widely, including through OCLC/WorldCat, the world’s largest bibliographic database. However, this led to a problem, how do you transfer over what was, at the time, 120 years of physical records into a new digital system?
Changing expectations
These days, we take for granted that when you upgrade to a new technological system, you can easily transfer data electronically. Transferring physical information into a digital system is more complex and time consuming, however. Over the last 35 years librarians have ensured that many books in the collection have been transferred, but there are still areas of the library where books and resources are not in our online catalogue, especially in the natural history areas.
This means it can be harder for Te Papa kaimahi to find material that is in the library collection that could be useful for their research, and other institutions and researchers don’t have an accurate idea of our holdings. This also means that the card catalogue has been retained by the library and is still used as a finding aid for books published and acquired before the electronic catalogue was introduced.
Not just by the numbers
To help solve this issue of searching manually, the library team began a project to retrospectively catalogue the entire library collection in 2022. Because card catalogues are generally meant to be finding aids, not the descriptive records of books that we associate with modern library catalogue records, you can’t just transfer the information from a card catalogue straight into a digital catalogue system.
Cataloguing practices have also changed over time in other ways. For example, the development of Ngā Upoko Tukutuku |Māori Subject Headings by the National Library means there are additional access points that need to be added to books about and for Māori that aren’t included in the card catalogue entry.
The approach that the library team decided on was to assess all the books held in library spaces we know have uncatalogued books shelf by shelf.
Books that already have an online catalogue record are straight forward to identify, they often have a printed call number on the spine of the book, have a barcode inside, or a note with the bibliographic record number that matches the digital record. That leaves us to identify the books that don’t have those markings so the library team can import or create catalogue records.
Where we’re up to
So far, the library team have finished cataloguing two locations, the Hector Library reading room which includes our general science books, and the library resources for the team that works with the museum’s fish collection. In total we have catalogued over 2,100 books and are updating our holdings on WorldCat every quarter so our resources can be truly reflected and findable for the first time.
Cataloguing the entire library collection will take years to complete, but it will be worth it to ensure researchers at Te Papa, and those from farther afield, can confidently access the unique and important books we have in the Te Aka Matua Research Library.
References
[1] https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/01/04/cataloging-evolves/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_public_access_catalog
This article highlights the importance of cataloguing in making history accessible for future generations. Regards Telkom University Jakarta
Great to understand what’s being done to make the library accessible and keep up with Māori Subject Headings as well. Awesome piece, ngā mihi nui to all the Kaitiaki o ngā Pukapuka!